Media Planners Embrace Digital Out-of-Home

eMarketer forecasts a fairly rosy outlook for outdoor advertising spending in the US, which is predicted to rise from $6.1 billion in 2010 to $6.4 billion this year and $7.6 billion by 2015. Growth in this area is supported by the continued relevance of outdoor to the daily lives of consumers as well as the growing share of spending devoted to newer forms of outdoor ads that are themselves digital media.

According to research from the Digital Place-based Advertising Association (DPAA), more than three-quarters of US media planners will incorporate digital place-based advertising in their marketing plans this year. That’s up more than 10 percentage points from 2010. By next year, it’s expected that 86.3% of media planners will be using digital out-of-home for marketing.

For the most part, budgets for digital out-of-home are coming from traditional outdoor advertising allocations. More than half of media planners said they would shift budgets from traditional to digital outdoor efforts. TV budgets were also a major source of additional dollars, but less than a quarter of media planners were pulling from overall digital budgets to fund place-based media.

In terms of overall outdoor ad spending, research conducted byKantar Media for the Outdoor Advertising Association of Americafound that miscellaneous services and amusements advertisers accounted for the largest share of spending, followed by media/advertising and financial companies. According to Kantar, Verizon Communications was the single biggest outdoor advertiser in 2010, spending nearly $70 million. McDonald’s was close behind, with outlays of $68.5 million.